


the bizarre flower of some unknown dream

by StripySock



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, First Time (sort of), M/M, Post Soulless Sam, Sam Winchester's Wall, Season/Series 06, Sickfic, a little drip of demon blood, character introspection, gencest, more gencest than wincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:42:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28411101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: Smiles a bit into the gloom, and curls his fingers around his own knife, as he sinks back into what's he fairly sure is about the third layer of a dream.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 71
Collections: SPN J2 Xmas Exchange





	the bizarre flower of some unknown dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quickreaver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quickreaver/gifts).



> Sorry for the delay quickreaver! I hope you enjoy this very small glimpse of Sam
> 
> Title is borrowed from Renee Vivien's _A Woman Appeared Before Me_
> 
> With deep thanks to asuralucier for giving this a much much needed once-over at superhuman speed

There's a hand behind Sam's head, gentle, almost reverent; it tips him back just a little, presses a cup against his mouth. He's burning up, and the cup is so cool, he wants it so badly, can feel the water in his mouth already. He's somewhere back in time; it's Dean's hand in his hair, Dean pressing a water bottle to his mouth, saying something so quiet and low that it's just a burr of sound, nonsensical to Sam's fever deadened ears. He jerks away instinctively, the barrier of years dropping, sudden fear gripping his chest, ice trickle of it cooling the heat. He must, the far distant bit of his mind that isn't shrivelled from the heat, tells him, very calmly, be close to dying.

The cup is pressed against his mouth again; Dean's insistence as always a little selfish, and itwipes out Sam’s resistance. The cup tilts a little, and the demon blood runs into his mouth.

When Sam bolts awake, he's sweating, the fever at least wasn't a dream. Wipes at his mouth again and again, nothing but a little spit, and then eventually when he rubs too hard, the cracking of a lip and his own blood. It's only a drop, but he can smell it even so, nose attuned after all these years to the scent.

In the next bed over, Dean turns, a questioning grunt in the dark. Sam can't see him, but he knows Dean’s watching. Maybe with his fingers curled under his pillow, tucked around a gun or cradling a knife. Dean wouldcouldshould hold them closer now, than he does a lover. Priorities it seems, must change up when times get bad. 

If Dean wasn't watching, Sam might curl his fingers in his hair and tug, a little sharp reminder of reality. As it is, he gets up, catches the blank green clockface of the alarm - past three in the morning, and decides, fuck it. A shower to wash the fear sweat away and to hell with Room 404 who'd been fucking half the night himself. Makes his way, naked, to the shower. Between the beds, Dean's hand drops back, useless, untaken.

In the shower, under the spray of too warm water, the endless fall of it Sam presses an arm against the tiles, the coolness of them, bites down hard on the fleshy part just above his elbow, not enough to break skin, and nowhere even close enough to being seen however much he rolls his sleeves up over the unassuming skin of his forearms. The marks never stay anyway, sometimes he wishes they would. Imagines a solemn circle of teeth marks reminding him of what it feels like to feel. Reminds him of how he should want to want it.

Back in the room, Dean's gone. Technically, Sam knows, with the sharp inevitable logic of dreaming, he probably wasn't ever there. It says something so fucked about his head that the only way he can imagine Dean beside him, reaching out an arm across the way, is like this, in the dead of night, still judging. He puts it with the rest of the bits of himself that he's collected, all back into the box. Someday if he can find a master puzzle hound, someone so good at sorting and finding, that they could make sense of which jagged piece went where, then he might be whole again. Until then, it's superglue and repression, duct tape and wishing. Mainstays of the Winchester toolbox.

When Sam climbs back into bed, washed and ready for the winding sheet of motel covers, he turns. He can feel Dean beside him, outraged silence heavy in the night. Smiles a bit into the gloom, and curls his fingers around his own knife, as he sinks back into what's he fairly sure is about the third layer of a dream.

What's inside of his head might be more of use at a junk sale than as parts of a person some days, but he's had more work in putting himself back together than pretty much anybody other than all the other Sams who stroll around. Another bit has popped back in the box, to jostle up close with the bit of him that'd like a drink - of demon blood, of cheap booze, of normal blood if he can't get any better, his own dripped down his throat in hell. Christ, he's so thirsty, he could drink a river dry. But yeah, despite all that, Sam knows, that it's all window-dressing. He knows what a dream looks like. He pulls the sheets around him and climbs feet first into the box himself and closes the lid. Sleep is sleep.

This time, when Sam wakes, he's about as sure as he can be, that he's really awake. There's no ring of teeth-bruises on his arm, but he's always healed quickly. And yeah they're in room 301 not 403, but the mind makes mistakes, repetitions, coincidences that creep up and call themselves foretelling. 

Pretty much the only irrefutable thing is Dean, clattering around the room, making coffee. That’s the one thing, Sam’s mind is pretty shitty at summoning up. All those years of life, so close to his brother, and he still can’t recreate Dean’s predictable unpredictability, in any way that Sam’s mind finds convincing unless it’s under cover of darkness.

Dean catches him watching, wanders closer. Sam knows he looks like shit, because the first look on Dean’s face is concern, little sharp flicker of it over his face. Sam must in fact look like warmed up death, for Dean’s first words not to be admonishment of him being a lazy asshole. Like clockwork, Dean’s fingers are on his forehead, as makeshift a nursemaid as Sam is a brother. 

“You’re burning up,” Dean says, like it’s Sam’s fault, like Sam opened his mouth and caught a germ on purpose. His fingers are still on Sam’s skin, and Sam is reminded of Dean beside him in his sleep. Which bit of him dragged Dean there, he wonders. Which bit of him knew Dean wouldn’t mind. He wonders if Dean thinks that under his fingers, beneath the brainbeat of Sam’s skull, he can trace the outline of the wall erected, the one that fractures and peels away into his sleep.

“Five more minutes,” Sam says. He has absolutely no intent of getting up, but an arbitrary time frame is always more appealing to Dean.

“Yeah, five hours more like,” Dean says, is back with a bottle of water. Sam’s tempted to muddle the line a little more, by letting Dean tilt it against his mouth, but his hand has a better sense of judgement than he does, comes up for it. Dean, cheated out of the attempt to play nurse, just watches, frowning. “Is it the wall?” he asks, Sam’s surprised he waited this long.

“No,” it’s the simple answer, the rest of it crawls out of Sam’s throat without much of his own volition, his voice as much a rebel as his hands. “Not really.” Sam wishes he could bite the words back, swallow them and tuck them into the dark hollow of his throat with the rest of the other things he manages to keep from saying. He has his own suspicions as to whether the two are connected, a body reflecting the mind, cracks running through the both. Dean, with a small unbelievable act of mercy doesn’t ask what he means.

Dean hovers still instead, uncertain, in the way he rarely is. He’s covered himself for years with action, like if he moves first, shoots first, loves first, the rest of it, the justification can come afterwards. Unsurprisingly, he nearly always manages to back-engineer a reason and call it truth. It’s not the trait Sam loves the most about his brother, his skill in all ways at repurposing. If he were kinder, he’d assume it was from having nothing of his own, but Sam grew up in that same car.

Sam falls asleep like that actually, the weight of Dean’s gaze heavy on him, even as Dean turns his back and potters around the room, picks up the Impala keys and vanishes out the door. Sam sleeps again, and doesn’t dream of anything at all.

The fever still hasn’t broken when Sam wakes up again, but there’s a headache to accompany it now, rocketing around his skull, following the fracture line that feels like it could be the wall. Dean’s not back, but he has been at some point. There’s a cooling coffee on the side - Dean is a great believer in caffeine as a cure, for hangovers, heartbreak and apparently for the flu. Beside it is Tylenol, more water and something that if Sam squints and gives the benefit of the doubt could be soup. It’s a TV version of care, probably where Dean learnt it from in the first place.

Stretching his hand for the water, he encounters the note first. Scrawled like it’s been written at speed. _Kind of a case, I think. Nothing big, I’ll be back soon, checking out._ There’s an address at the bottom, an afterthought. Sam needs to get up, there’s never been anything good, in the history of ever, when Dean leaves a note like that. He gets his hand around his cell, picks out the numbers through the headache glare, texts Dean _asshole get back here._ As an afterthought, he pecks out _I’m fine, you’re not._ Regrets it as soon as he hits send. The first one might’ve got Dean back here, angry or not.

Sam drops the cell and stares at the water stained ceiling, considers the superhuman effort of moving, and gets his head most of the way up. It’s only a little more to roll over and sit up. A great deal less to be rolled back, as something sits on his hips, and presses both hands, claws, on his chest and presses _down_ like they’re pressing into his chest, in search of something more substantial than a soul. It looks like Dean, like the sort of thing that leans against him in the night, and makes him want to die from the force of feeling. 

Sam doesn’t know what it wants, but he’s scrabbling under his pillow, because this bit he knows. Killing something he loves, or at least being the cause of it.

It's pinning him, hands in his chest, and hair in his face, a lot of it. It's thin, dry and wispy, whatever it is that's scooping his guts out through his heart, has been dead a long time. He can smell it, suffocatingly sweet, kind of smells like coffee on a desk with too much sugar, just the way Sam likes it. He's coughing as it rummages through him, gathers up his strength, and launches himself backwards. He's tired of things inside him, so tired. 

Blood he can't spit out, Lucifer methodically stamping his name on every section of his guts, one by one, intent and methodical in all his ways of destruction. A memory Sam doesn't have, but still knows happened, because at night in dreams, he catches sight of the handiwork. Even Cas's hand in his chest, only known through repute. Every bit of it. His fingers grasp the knife and it's far from the hardest thing he's killed. Even if it feels like it's taking the rest of him with it. The knife sinks in, completely bloodless, and the soft sigh it makes is disturbingly familiar.

The knife comes out, even easier than it went in, and he can only call what the thing does dissolving. He'd thought the fever was all the thing, but he's still burning up. Maybe that just gave it an entrance. Sam's shaking now, the weight of it gradually lifting from his hips, obscene parody of an embrace. He sucks in air, lungfuls of it, even as he tries to hold his breath in case he inhales whatever the death of this thing is. Once again, his lungs, like his hands, his voice and his traitorous heart betray him. He doesn't own anything but himself and even that isn't enough.

The door crashes open, and Dean's there, Doc Holliday turning up late to the O.K. Corral and Sam? Sam is not OK.

Sam knows what it looks like, revolts against the horrified, almost tender look on Dean’s face, the peeled back rawness of his emotions, no matter how quickly it’s hidden. He’s tired of that look. Struggles to sit upright, back against the headboard, the disintegrated remains of a nameless thief dispersed all over the covers. 

Dean drops his bag, heavy clank of it heralding a weapon, tosses his cell onto the table and gets there just in time for Sam to push him off. Watches him every step of the way suspicious, as he makes his way to Dean's bed, not much gap between the brother and the beast. Night's falling again, shadows sweeping, and as Sam turns in Dean's bed and shivers from the fever-cold, like this, he can feel Dean watching. Sinks back into his dreams, and the last thing he feels before he sleeps is Dean's mouth on his, half on his cheek, half on his lip, tastes entirely of blood. 

Maybe this time he'll wake up.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always appreciated


End file.
